It doesn’t start out very interstellar.
It starts with an agricultural blight and a family fighting it on their own
farm. Widower Cooper lives with his father-in-law Donald and his children Tom
and Murphy. They are trying to adapt. The world needs farmers, not engineers
and pilots like Cooper.

The Apollo space missions are said not to
have happened, they were just invented propaganda. It was the consumerism of
that period that caused the current environmental disaster, but Cooper – who
knows the missions took place because he was on some of them – longs for the
days of space travel and high tech. He hates being a farmer. And he denies his
daughter Murphy’s claim that their house has a poltergeist.

And then he and Murphy discover that NASA
still exists – in hiding. Old Dr Brand
(Michael Caine) says, ‘We are not meant to save the world, we are meant to
leave it.’ The plan is to send someone out after the three missions that
earlier tried to colonise other planets. Cooper is the chosen pilot to
accompany Brand’s daughter Emilia, also a physicist, and two other scientists,
on a mission to rescue and awaken those earlier missions. So Cooper blasts off,
leaving his weeping children behind.

In a blippy time warp Cooper and Brand are
separated from the other two for a few minutes only to discover that 23 years
have passed when they are reunited. Cooper has received messages from his
children for 23 years. It’s not possible to answer them.

Earth continues to die as the space
travellers have existential discussions about love vs science. With quotes from
‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’ there is drama and philosophy in this
odd mixed bag.